US Homeland Security supremo is an email luddite

The US government’s Homeland Security Tsar is so far out of touch with technology that she could be living on another planet in another dimension trying to play chess with Schrodinger’s cat.

It is one thing to say, in this day and age, that you can’t be bothered using a smartphone or a tablet, it is quite another to say you don’t look at email.

According to the new Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano, she doesn’t use email because it is inefficient and “sucks up time”. She prefers to dial someone on a landline and talk to them for half an hour to pass the same amount of information on.

According to the Hill she thinks it is also super efficient to hire someone to open your email because you are technophobe and tell you what other people are saying.

Avoiding email “allows me to focus on where I need to focus,” she growled. We guess that means that cyber-warfare will be off the agenda because if she does not think she needs to focus on her email chances are she will not think that electronic communication is something she needs to see either.

She apparently stopped using email in 2003 when she was the governor of Arizona and managed not to see one when she took over the DHS in 2009. So if you wondered why Homeland Security think it is great security to check your shoes and take your belt off before you board a plane, you know where these wizard ideas come from.

Napolitano said her email-less life also keeps her from being accused of seeing communications that may have come into her inbox.

“I also don’t like the process where people could send you an email and then say, ‘See, you were told.’ Or, ‘You know this.’ And then it comes back two years later to say, ‘Hey you got this email,'” she said.

Funny, in the communication age we call that sort of thing being an informed manager.